ATLANTIC CONVOY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 86, Issue 64, 17 March 1942, Page 5

ATLANTIC CONVOY

TRIALS OF ESCORT CRAFT SEVERITY OF CONDITIONS (Recd. 5.5 p.m.) Rugby, March 15. A picture of the terrifying severity of the winter conditions in which Atlantic escort vessels brought convoys safely to Britain was given by Mr. H. C. Ferraby, well-known naval commentator. “Here is one among many incredible adventures that men have been through in destroyers and Other escort vessels in the Atlantic during the awful weather of the past winter, he said. “The wind was blowing a moderate gale and seas were running up to twenty feet high. A destroyer battling through it gave a violent roll to port and a huge wav-' broke on to the upper deck where the gun’s crew were clinging round the gun. That sea got under the heavy metal platform on which the gun stood and bent it upwards until it pinned one of the men between the upturned sheet of metal and the breach of the gun. Heavy tackle had to be rigged, with the ship rolling heavil -, before the plate could be bent back sufficiently and the injured man released. That is the sort of thing that has been happening to convoy escorts almost continuously since last September. There has never been such a winter of gales in which there have been gusts blowing more than 75 miles an hour. “In another case a succession of unusually large seas astern swung a ship . bout for a minute or two almost out of control, and in one roll she lay over at an angle of 70 degrees. Her starboard propeller was actually out of the water and the port side of the bridge was under water. The man in the wheelhouse had a fleeting glimpse, as the signal platform was submerged, of a seaman clinging witn both hands to the thin wire of the forestay of a mast. The surge of water swept his feet from under him and held him out horizontally, so that actually during the half-minute that the ship hung at the end of the roll he was suspended, submerged, outside the ship. “Again, in a gale in which driving rain made visibility often less than 1000 yards, the escort vessel found herself with only two merchantmen out of the large convoy. By hard work in heaving seas, in which the task of keeping his own ship safe would have been enough for most men, the escort captain rounded up eight more merchantmen and got them at last into an area of eight miles. And, still battling against a 35-mile-an-hour gale, he shepherded them safely to their dispersal point.” —8.0.W.